IT Horizons is Africa’s partner of choice in all things relating to Information Communication Technology, (ICT). With a staff strength rich in knowledge, skill and expertise, we have all it takes to attend to all your technology needs. Our ultimate goal as a brand is to drive a world-class transformation through your business using technology Our focal point is technology-enabled solutions and professional services for today’s businesses and innovation that shapes tomorrow’s business world.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Head of Engineering

Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time

The Opportunity

• The Head of Engineering is one of the most consequential hires we will make.
• This is an executive role with real ownership — over our engineering culture, our technical roadmap, our adoption of AI-driven development practices, and the performance of every engineering team across the company.
• You will report directly to the CTO and work shoulder-to-shoulder with product, compliance, sales / growth, and business leadership to ensure that what we build is not only technically excellent, but globally competitive.
• You will inherit a talented team and be expected to make it significantly better — faster, more reliable, more innovative, and more autonomous.
• This is not a role for someone who wants to manage processes.
• It is a role for someone who wants to set the direction of engineering at a company that is building something genuinely important in global tech space — and who has the track record to prove they can do it.

Core Responsibilities
Engineering Leadership & Team Excellence:

• Lead, mentor, and scale a multi-disciplinary engineering organisation — across backend, frontend, mobile, infrastructure (DevOps), and QA — setting a culture of ownership, craft, and continuous improvement.
• Establish and maintain a robust engineering management layer: hire and develop Engineering Managers, set clear expectations, and build the feedback loops that keep high performers engaged and growing.
• Own metrics and engineering performance data. Use deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and MTTR as the baseline for measuring and improving team effectiveness — and be ready to present these to executive leadership.
• Drive talent strategy: define levelling frameworks, run structured performance reviews, and build succession plans that reduce key-person risk at every level of the org.

Global Engineering Standards & Technical Governance:

• Define, document, and enforce global software engineering standards — covering architecture principles, code quality, security practices, API design, testing requirements, and release management — that apply consistently across all products and all geographies.
• Coordinate and lead a team to review technical decisions, manage architectural debt, and ensure that standards evolve as the business scales.
• Lead the engineering team through compliance requirements relevant to global fintech operations, including data residency, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, and applicable African regulatory frameworks.
• Champion a platform engineering mindset: build internal tooling, shared infrastructure, and developer platforms that multiply team productivity rather than creating bespoke solutions for every product.

AI-First Engineering Mandate:

• Spearhead the company’s AI adoption strategy across all engineering functions — from AI-assisted coding (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude or equivalent) to AI-driven QA, intelligent observability, self-healing infrastructure, and predictive analytics pipelines.
• Evaluate, pilot, and systematically roll out AI tools that measurably improve engineering velocity, code quality, and system reliability — with defined success metrics and rollout playbooks for each.
• Build organisational AI fluency: run internal capability programmes, establish AI usage guidelines, and ensure engineers at every level are equipped to work effectively alongside AI systems.
• Partner with other internal teams to define and deliver ML/AI features within our fintech products — including fraud detection models, anomaly detection, predictive cashflow tools, and intelligent reconciliation systems.

Architecture, Infrastructure & Reliability:

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture across our SaaS platforms, mobile apps, and enterprise systems — ensuring they are scalable, resilient, maintainable, and designed for global operation.
• Drive a cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code culture with high standards for uptime, disaster recovery, and zero-trust security. Define and enforce SLOs and SLAs across all production systems.
• Lead the migration or modernisation of any legacy systems that create technical debt, risk, or velocity constraints — with clear business cases, timelines, and risk mitigation plans.
• Embed self-healing infrastructure capabilities: automated remediation, intelligent alerting, and proactive capacity planning that reduce manual toil and improve system resilience over time.

Product & Cross-Functional Alignment:

• Partner tightly with the Product Team, Growth/Sales and other stakeholders within the organisation to translate product strategy into engineering roadmaps — with realistic timelines, clear dependencies, and honest risk communication.
• Participate in executive planning cycles: contribute technical perspective to business strategy, M&A due diligence, partnership evaluations, and build/buy/partner decisions.
• Act as the internal voice of engineering credibility — representing technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders without obscuring complexity or over-simplifying risk.
• Drive cross-border product delivery, ensuring engineering teams understand the technical nuances of multi-currency systems, real-time payment rails, regulatory reporting, and international data compliance.

Engineering Velocity & Delivery Excellence:

• Implement and continuously refine a delivery system — sprint cadences, release pipelines, incident management protocols, and post-mortem cultures — that makes the team faster without sacrificing quality.
• Build a world-class CI/CD capability: fully automated test suites, progressive delivery mechanisms (feature flags, canary releases, blue-green deployments), and deployment pipelines that make shipping safe and frequent.
• Set a high bar for observability: ensure all production systems have comprehensive logging, distributed tracing, and dashboards that give the team — and the business — a clear view of what’s happening in real time.
• Drive engineering OKRs based on business expectations, review quarterly with executive leadership i.e. expectations vs outcomes.

Security, Compliance & Risk Management:

• Embed security into the engineering lifecycle from design through deployment — shift-left security practices, threat modelling, dependency scanning, and penetration testing as standard parts of how we build.
• Own engineering’s relationship with regulatory bodies, external auditors, and security reviewers across all operating jurisdictions — ensuring we are always audit-ready and never scrambling.
• Build and maintain a robust incident response capability, with clear runbooks, defined escalation paths, and a blameless post-mortem culture that turns failures into organisational learning.

Mandatory Requirements & Qualifications
Leadership Track Record — Non-Negotiable:

• 10+ years in software engineering with at least 4–5 years in senior engineering leadership (VP, Director, or Head of Engineering level), managing teams of 20+ engineers across multiple product lines (is a plus).
• Demonstrable, metrics-backed evidence of engineering team performance — delivery throughput, uptime improvements, or equivalent. You should be able to walk into this interview with numbers.
• Proven experience scaling engineering organisations through periods of rapid growth: hiring, structuring, levelling, and retaining high-performing engineers and engineering managers.
• A track record of successfully delivering complex, high-stakes software products — on time, to quality, in regulated or high-reliability environments.

Fintech & Cross-Border Systems Experience:

• Direct experience building or scaling financial technology products — payments infrastructure, cross-border remittance, multi-currency systems, digital banking, or enterprise financial software.
• Deep familiarity with the regulatory landscape for global fintech: PCI-DSS, SOC 2, open banking frameworks, AML/KYC requirements, and the compliance demands of operating across multiple jurisdictions.
• Experience working with payment rails — i.e. local real-time payment networks — and the technical complexity of building reliable, low-latency, high-integrity financial transaction systems.
• Understanding of African fintech market dynamics is a strong advantage: mobile money ecosystems, central bank API standards, and the infrastructure realities of emerging market financial systems.

Technical Depth:

• Strong architectural command across modern software stacks — cloud-native distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and API-first design.
• Hands-on experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) at scale, including container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern observability stacks.
• Practical experience implementing AI/ML capabilities in production — whether integrating LLMs, deploying ML models, or embedding AI tooling into engineering workflows.
• Experience designing and scaling high-availability, high-throughput systems with strict data integrity requirements — the kind where failure has real financial consequences.

Executive & Communication Capabilities:

• Board and C-suite fluency: you can translate complex technical strategy into clear business language without losing the substance, and hold your own in executive-level planning and investment conversations.
• Strong written communication — you write clearly, set context well, and produce documentation, architecture decision records, and engineering strategy papers that people actually read.

Key Performance Indicators

• Success in this role will be measured against clear, quantifiable outcomes.
• The following KPIs are examples which will be reviewed at agreed intervals with the CTO and executive leadership.

Application Closing Date
23rd September, 2026.